I've been wearing my snow boots lately with all of the mud. They're the only boots I have here, and I brought them specifically for the heavy rains we were warned about.
However, I get laughed at wherever I wear them - big time. "His boots" I hear all of the time, in Portuguese AND in Changana (luckily, it's the same thing), and when I turn around to point the boots out, I get a good laugh myself. The problem is that they are big and made for snow - which doesn't happen all that often around here.
I was thinking about fate today, and why it's so easy to be trapped (or believe) into thinking that everything we do is predetermined. If you think of the world as three possible timeframes (past, present and future), then you need to account for the transition that the future makes into the past. Often, it's easy to say that this endless and quite intimidating wealth of possible paths is best dealt with by invoking an outside, invisible, unalterable force like fate. Sometimes it's God, sometimes a combination of the two. And if you believe that you have the power to make all of these decisions on your own, and you are in complete control of your future, then you feel empowered. Then, there's a middle ground where you feel that 99% of the decisions are not left up to you, but to others who are busy living their lives. The 1% that you can control empowers you, too.
But if you avoid the trap of compartmentalizing time and realize that the past and future are just constructions of an indivisible present, things look totally different. Because time has no opposite - there is no TIMELESS state - it doesn't really exist. We define seconds, hours, and minutes based upon our planet's rotation around the sun and historical chance. So what's happened has happened and only exists by its manifestations in the present. If I break a window, we can see a broken window, a video of the window breaking, or think of our favorite memory of looking through the window. All in the present. The past as this static, irreparable thing is false. The past is imply what has happened to make the present what it is - the present is a direct result of the past and it can be said IS the past.
So, what to do about the future? The future is all of the things that have not yet happened, implying that we know that things that will happen. It is this point which fools the fatalists. The future, as it should be defined, is all of the things that haven't ALREADY happened. It is the direct opposite of the past. Nothing that has happened can happen in exactly the same way. And so in this split between future and past, we see that it is the singular thing that we were splitting the entire time. Our line in the sand just happened to be whether something has happened or not. Which is quite arbitrary. Can anyone tell you everything that has happened? Can you remember everything that has happened to you in the last hour? EVERYTHING? Yet, if something that has happened has no manifestation in the "present", has it really happened? For example, if a tree falls in the forest...
Clearly, this past/future split is not so simple. So I'm not going to go nuts trying to define what the past/future split really is, suffice to say that it is only a line in the sand. The future and the past are equally mysterious. We have a good idea about both of them, but we're never sure.
Yet given all this, it seems like Fate can fit nicely with both the past and future, because all Fate says is that the future has a subdivision between what will happen and what won't happen. But what's drawing this line? And if nothing other than this entity drawing lines in the sand knows about these lines, do they really exist? So what's Fate, aside from giving a label for what moves from the future side into the past side of the line?
Really, it doesn't matter. Regardless of the existence of Fate (which cannot be determined), I want to exercise my control over what I can control. If Fate was there the whole time, then so be it. But at least I tried.
I guess that's what frustrates me sometimes. People who don't try because they see some uncontrollable end to any and all of their efforts. Even if it's predetermined, YOU don't know the future.
More rain. I'm tired of not being able to do things outside. Granted, I've made a lot of progress on a couple projects, but I'm here to help people directly.
ACPs (exams) start tomorrow. That means I'll most likely be doing a lot of typing for other teachers' exams.
Peace
John
